The Featherbed
For my late grandmothers,
Chip Kellermann and Claire Miller
The Featherbed
~ a novel ~
John Miller
Copyright © John Miller, 2002
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.
Editor: Barry Jowett
Copy-Editor: Andrea Pruss
Design: Jennifer Scott
Printer: Transcontinental
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
Miller, John, 1968-
The featherbed / by John Miller.
ISBN 1-55002-401-9
I. Title.
PS8576.I53885F43 2002 C813’.6 C2002-904331-X PR9199.4.M555F43 2002
1 2 3 4 5 06 05 04 03 02
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Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credit in subsequent editions.
J. Kirk Howard, President
Printed and bound in Canada.
Printed on recycled paper.
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Acknowledgements
My uncle, Bob Kellermann, surely could not have predicted five years ago that a simple birthday gift would lead to all of this. The gift was a book about Jewish immigrants in North America, and reading it sparked my imagination. David Mayerovitch, holding up Shakespeare and Buffy the Vampire Slayer as examples, taught me the importance of building a story good enough to tell. My deepest gratitude goes to novelist Cary Fagan, both for his thoughtful editing and review of early drafts and for helping me to find Rebecca’s voice. Zoe Kende, a talented midwife and good friend, educated me about the wonders, risks, and logistics of pregnancy and childbirth.
Throughout my life, I have been lucky that so many sensitive, powerful, and intelligent women have taken me into their confidence. In writing in the female voice, I hope that I have done them justice. Some of these women read my work critically and offered the kindest encouragement: Linda Bradbeer, Jeanette Browne, Kathryn Drummond, June Galbraith, Judy Godfrey, Sophia Ikura-MacMillan, Janet Killoran, Edda Kirleis, Myra Lefkowitz, Heidi Maroney, Vanessa Russell, Debra Shime, Pam Shime, Carol Toller, Hilary Trapp, Ellen Waxman, Dubravka Zarkov, and especially my mother, Ruth Miller.
Thanks also go to those who, in spite of their Y-chromosomes, offered similar advice and support: my father, Eric, my brothers Daniel and Tony, and friends David Adkin, Adam Arshinoff, Tim Clarkin, Scott Henderson, Onindo Khan, Bryan Patchett and Wolfram Walbrach.
The curators and staff of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York are to be commended for their meticulously reconstructed apartments, which helped me to imagine the possibilities and limitations of tenement life. For bibliographical research, I consulted numerous sources, of which the most influential were: Abraham Cahan’s Yekl and the Imported Bridegroom; Kathy Friedman-Kasaba’s Memories of Migration; Susan Glenn’s Daughters of the Shtetl; Emma Goldman’s Living My Life; Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers; C.W. Hunt’s Booze, Boats and Billions: Smuggling Liquid Gold; A Bintel Brief, edited by Isaac Metzker; Kathy Preiss’s Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn of the Century New York; Jacob A. Riis’s How The Other Half Lives; Barbara A. Schreier’s Becoming American Women; Kate Simon’s Bronx Primitive; Sydney Stahl Weinberg’s The World of Our Mothers; Lillian Wald’s House on Henry Street; and the novels of Anzia Yezierska.
I am grateful to Dundurn for taking a chance on an unknown author, in particular to my editor, Barry Jowett, for his enthusiasm and his careful stewardship of my final draft, and to Andrea Pruss, for her meticulous copy-editing.
Finally, I must thank novelists Chaim Potok, Amy Tan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Ann-Marie MacDonald, whose exquisite prose and beautifully crafted stories inspired me to become a writer.
Chapter One
Four days before she died, Anna Cooperman’s mother made a banal and seemingly pointless confession from her hospital bed, a non sequitur in the middle of grumbling about the dirty linen in her apartment.
“Objects hold meaning,” she said, as though this were an important and novel idea.
Anna had decided not to pursue it. After all, every few hours her mother said something baffling. Just a short while before, she had muttered in her sleep something about a chicken.
Rebecca became agitated when her daughter did not acknowledge the remark.
“Listen!” She struggled to sit up in her bed, propped herself precariously against the headboard. Her face turned grave, the wrinkles in her skin seemed deeper than usual.
“Sometimes, you have to look at an object like a special doorway,” she said, holding up her hands as though to cup a crystal ball, “a doorway to the heart. And if you can find the key to the door, what you see on the other side might surprise you. For instance, Anna dear, an object might reveal a person’s hopes and dreams. Hopes and dreams you maybe didn’t know about. Or —” she threw the crystal ball to the ground “— it might reveal all of her follies and her heartache. And sometimes, the same object might represent all of those things. All of them.”
“That’s very true,” Anna said, to humour her, and then she settled the old woman back into her bed. When her mother became emotional, her descriptions were often elaborate metaphors, but they usually weren’t riddles, and so she dismissed the remark as another demented outburst caused by the stroke.
But today, hurrying around the corner onto Eldridge and catching sight of the old synagogue’s rose windows, it occurred to her that the building might tell her something about her mother, if only because she had loved it so much. She remembered the story she had been told as a child about how the temple came to be built, and suddenly she wondered if there was more to the hospital outburst than she had allowed.
Anna had been seven years old when she first learned the temple’s history.
“The